Sounds Around Town: The marimbas are coming! The marimbas are coming!

By Ed Symkus Correspondent

Wednesday

Mar 14, 2018 at 4:34 PMMar 17, 2018 at 9:45 AM

It’s all marimbas, all the time when the Lilypad in Cambridge hosts March Marimba Madness on March 20. The lineup includes two improvisational marimbists: Boston-based Maria Finkelmeier and Sweden-based Rolf Landberg, and the Boston duo Marimba Cabaret, featuring marimbist Brian Calhoon and marimbist/percussionist Greg Jukes. Each act will do separate 25-minute sets of their own repertoire, then join together for a group jam.

Not sure of what a marimba is? Think of a xylophone, but made of wood, and much larger and, like the xylophone and vibraphone, played with mallets. Brian Calhoon has been enamored of the instrument since the day he signed up for symphonic band in his freshman year in high school and stumbled upon one in the band room.

“My first instrument was piano,” said the San Francisco native who moved east for graduate studies at Boston Conservatory. “I took piano lessons but I hated practicing. So I quit and picked up drum set, but that was too loud for me.”

Then came that fateful meeting with that marimba.

“I’d never seen one before,” he said. “It was laid out like a piano, with two manuals – the black and white keys, so to speak. Because of playing drums, I knew how to work sticks, and because of playing piano, I knew how the layout worked.”

Calhoon took to the marimba, eventually playing it, along with other percussion instruments, for three years (2003-2005) as a member of the Blue Devils, a professional, competitive marching band that’s part of Drum Corps International

“I was playing marimba, vibraphone, xylophone, and tympani in the pit,” he recalled. “We didn’t march around as much as the other members, but we still worked hard and contributed to the show. During my third year, our show had a theme: dance marathons of the ’30s and ’40s, where couples would compete, and whoever could dance the longest was the winning couple. We were going to have a narrator who would tell a bit more of the story.

"At one rehearsal, Scott Johnson, the percussion director for the Blue Devils, asked if any of us had theater experience. I was in drama club in high school, so I raised my hand, and I was the only one who raised a hand. He said ‘Great, come with me.’ I sat down with the show’s artistic coordinator, who said, ‘Here’s your script, here are your talking points, you’re going talk during parts of the show to further the story.” I thought, ‘OK I can do that,’ but all those times were when the pit was playing. I realized I needed to learn how to play the same music everyone else was playing but also speak over it during certain parts, not mess up my lines or the music, and make it sound like an organic thing. That was the single most difficult challenge I’ve ever had. But it was what started my ability to sing and play the marimba.”

Which is what Calhoon does in Marimba Cabaret, and is no easy feat. He experimented with doing both at once while studying at San Francisco Conservatory. His percussion teacher, Jack Van Geem, knew something special when he heard it, and suggested that Calhoon study at Boston with marimbist Nancy Zeltsman.

“She gave me the validation that what I was doing was cool and interesting, but also that it had a lot of potential for me to carve out my own identity in the marimba world, doing this unusual thing, but doing it at a high enough level that it’s not just a parlor trick,” said Calhoon.

After finishing school in 2010, Calhoon and three other percussionists formed Boston Percussion Group, which still performs pieces the quartet has commissioned. Calhoon also met and eventually teamed up with percussionist Greg Jukes, the other half of Marimba Cabaret.

“Greg saw me do one of my solo concerts at a library, where I played some Bach and Duke Ellington on the marimba, and sang ‘Something’s Coming’ from ‘West Side Story’ and an art song a friend of mine had set for me,” said Calhoon. “He said he thought what I was doing could be a show, and wanted to help me develop it. My primary instrument is marimba, his primary instrument is vibraphone and drum set, so it just kind of fit; we each found a true duo partner. In June of 2016, we premiered Marimba Cabaret, and we’ve been finetuning it over the years.”

At the Lilypad show, Calhoon will be playing marimba and singing, and Jukes will be playing marimba and drum set, in a program including “Something’s Coming,” Rufus Wainwright’s “The Art Teacher,” Stephen Sondheim’s “Marry Me a Little” from “Company,” and other pieces that he considers marimba-centric.

Calhoon loves everything about the marimba, except, maybe, its size.

“It’s eight and a half feet long,” he said. “Fortunately, it comes apart. It breaks down into eight cases, and it fits into my Subaru Forester when the seats are pushed all the way up. My one regret about the marimba is that I resent flute players, who can just walk out after a show and they’re gone within 90 seconds. Meanwhile, we start the 20-minute breakdown and have to load it in the car and then unload it in the house. It’s an effort. But it’s totally worth it.”